First, the area's attachment to the Islamic religion has almost nothing to do with anything. Second, Israel is the ancestral homeland of the Jews, according to the Bible. Third, prior to Canaan being taken by the Jews it was inhabited by countless tribes ending with suffix "ite" (canaanites, hittites, and etc). When the Jews came in they cleared the land of the pagan, idol-worshipping, tribes and set up camp. Finally, after the death of christ, Rome sacked the temple in Jerusalem in 70 AD, and kinda scattered the Jews. SOOOOOO when they rebooted their country post war world 2, they chose israel, their ancestral homeland. I guess the simple answer is that they were there "first" and want to return.

I guess my main problem is that in the intervening years when the Jewish people where scattered other groups of people came in and set up shop and lived there for centuries. Just because you were there first does not give you the right to eject people from thier homes

I agree, but thats not exactly what the Jews did. They came back in and reestablished their country, but the didn't kick everyone out. The muslims in the area still hotly contest the Jewish right to the land because they do not regard the Bible as a historical document. Which is a little two faced considering they hold their precious Quran above such dispute. Thus, all the angst in the Middle East right now. It all stems from the Jews coming back in. SO I see your point and I agree, but since they didn't really do that and since some Jews still lived in the area in the intervening years I think they are fine.

Well i think that they are related. if the land has been inhabited by Palestinians, ottomans and so on for hundreds of years does that not make it their homeland. in the same way that it is the people of Israels homeland. so why did one group get favor over the other?

Well yes i suppose so. if the area was not claimed by a separate group of people then there is no problem. i have a source http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel . Wikipedia i know not the the most reliable of sources but it says that other groups occupied the land from 635 CE.

From what I know the Hebrews were given permission to return to Israel because they had no other homeland. After the diaspora and later the Holocaust, they were all over the world and wanted to regroup after being persecuted.

I get the impression that this isn't an honest question. But I'll proceed as though it was.

The aftermath of WWII was messy. Quite, quite messy. Parts of Europe were being taken over as proxy states by the Russians, and now that we didn't need the Russians, we remembers how bat-shit crazy their leaders actually were.

Meanwhile, in Western Europe, there was a lot of bad karma bouncing around in the form of homeless Jews. Having been transported, often halfway across the continent, by the efficient German killing machine, they were finding it problematic to get home, and those who did often found there was no home left. What with the bombing and the killing and the war and all. At the same time, it was also becoming more and more clear just how morally culpable America, France, the UK, Canada, and others were in the Holocaust. The Allies simply turned a blind eye to mounting evidence of what was going on back in the late 1930s. It's hard to justify being complicit in genocide.

Into this fray, enter a simple request (I forget by which particular organization) to create a Jewish nation. It made a lot of sense in the political landscape at the time: as a hedge against future genocides, as an apology to a group that was clearly owed an apology by more than just the Germans, and as a political ally of the West in a region of the world whose importance was becoming clear, and where no strong and consistent ally existed at the time.

Now, the Jewish organizations who were calling for their own nation absolutely knew where they wanted it (more or less). And from a rational perspective, one place was just about as good as another in the Middle East once you understand that every modern Middle Eastern country was basically invented by the UK, France, and Germany, with some input from Turkey, in the early 20th Century. The borders were drawn right through cohesive tribal regions, and also lumped together groups that had historically hated each other. In short, it was Africa 2.0: countries that don't make sense, brought to you by countries who don't give a shit.

So if the Jews say that they want the UK protectorate/territory of Palestine as their nation, who was going to argue? They had to go somewhere, and it's not like the precise borders of Palestine were based on ancient tradition, that's just where Her Majesty's surveyors plunked them. If anything, you could say that the location was tradition: people had been fighting about who got to control Jerusalum for millenia, why not keep the party going?

TL;DR: Someone was gonna be pissed no matter what, but when you hold the Ace of Genocide trump card, the other players will let you take the hand.

This makes a lot of sense obviously the Jewish people were owed a lot by the world defiantly more than an apology. But what i disagree with is the assertion that these areas were somehow tribal. i mean the ottoman empire had only fallen some 30 years before and an empire that large existing for that long. the divisions would have been made decades even centuries before.

You need to Wiki this stuff. The territory that became Israel did not have a cohesive, autonomous existence at any time prior to the creation of Israel. It was pieces and parts of other countries. And the heartland itself has been ruled by a dozen different countries since 1000 A.D. You have this view like someone just gave Switzerland to the Austrians or something, and it's totally incorrect.

It's stuff like this that makes intelligent people stop contributing to Reddit. Seriously. What I said was, and you can read it yourself for the first time, "The territory that became Israel did not have a cohesive, autonomous existence at any time prior to the creation of Israel." Your response was to show me that it was a captive (i.e., nonautonomous) state in a much larger empire. And you said it like it's a response. It's like I asked you how you got to school today, and you said "toast."

I'm going to stop now. I said in the beginning that I didn't think this was a serious question, just someone with a fixed (and likely ill-informed) point of view trying to argue with people. You've now removed any doubt I previously had.